Spring in Barcelona - Spring I/O 2018

The Spring community gathered again in Barcelona for the largest Spring conference in Europe. This year Sergi Almar and his team chose a new venue, the Palau de Congressos de Barcelona, which offered room for 1000 attendees. The conference was sold out and so the amount of participants could be doubled compared to the year before.

The Spring team kicked off the conference with Juergen Hoeller, who gave on overview of what is coming in Spring, especially regarding Java’s new release cycle. He also gave some interesting recommendations on how to deal with the new release cycle:

  • consider staying on the JVM classpath (as opposed to using modules)
  • consider staying on Java 8 bytecode level
  • build against JDK 8, run against JDK 11 (to leverage runtime benefits)

Afterwards Madhura Bhave and Brian Clozel gave a really entertaining overview on what is new in Spring Boot 2.0.

Implementing DDD with the Spring Ecosystem

One of the talks I enjoyed most was Implementing DDD with the Spring Ecosystem by Michael Plöd. The talk contained some interesting thoughts, e.g. on how to keep aggregates Spring-free while still leveraging the power of Spring Data repositories. I will have to dig through the example application accompanying the talk for additional ideas that can be applied to our projects.

REST beyond the obvious – API design for ever evolving systems

Another talk with interesting insights was REST beyond the obvious – API design for ever evolving systems by Oliver Gierke. Oliver showed that often too much business logic is replicated into the API client.

He also gave hints on how to avoid this leakage and why API versioning is usually not the answer.

Documenting RESTful APIs with Spring REST Docs and RAML

I was really happy that I also got the chance to speak at this year’s Spring I/O. I talked about Documenting RESTful APIs with Spring REST Docs and RAML. This talk covered the development and evolution of our public REST API documentation and introduced Spring REST Docs with a sample project and some live coding. It also showed how and why you can use our open source project restdocs-raml to get a RAML API description out of your tests.

It was a great experience to talk at such a big conference and in front of such a great community.

💚 Spring I/O 2018

Again, it was a great conference with some really interesting talks, great people, and really good food. Thanks to all the organizers - you did an awesome job. And by the way - Barcelona is really not the worst city for a few conference days.

About the author

Mathias Düsterhöft is a passionate Software Engineer with focus on Java and Kotlin, and a lot of experience in the Spring ecosystem. He loves open source and is the maintainer of restdocs-raml.